


Dust to Dust (the indelible remix)

by originally



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dwarf Culture & Customs, Gen, House Cadash - Freeform, Pre-Canon, Remix, Remix Redux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-03 19:19:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4112101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/pseuds/originally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>House Cadash may have been exiled from Orzammar, but the authorities never looked too closely at the fluctuating population of Dust Town. Few of the guards liked to be assigned there, and even fewer bothered to look above the brand. It was as nothing to slip a few women into Dust Town, women who could be positioned to spy on the comings and goings of the underground city that had spat them out, generations back.</i>
</p><p>The story of Cadash the Casteless, and how she came to be the Herald of Andraste.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dust to Dust (the indelible remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TourmalineQueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineQueen/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Dust Town](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3147965) by [TourmalineQueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineQueen/pseuds/TourmalineQueen). 



> One of the details in this story is based on the fact that there is a junk item in DA2 called 'Weathered Dwarven Clan Pin'; repurposing canon tidbits for my own needs, my favourite thing.
> 
> I'm indebted to Hippo and Azriel for their helpful comments on this story. Remaining mistakes are mine.

For as long as she can remember, she has known who she is.

 _Once upon a time_ , she recalls her mother murmuring when she tucked her in after their nightly lessons.  _Once upon a time, there was a house of great warriors who had a place of their own, a majestic thaig, but it was stolen from them, and they were cast out from the city that birthed them._  Malika would curl her fingers around the tarnished metal of her house pin and listen.

Life in Dust Town was always hard on Malika’s mother, she who had been born on the surface. She resented Orzammar for bringing House Cadash low, and resented that her House had asked her to live there, amongst the grim and grey natives. Malika’s father had been no one, a ghost of a duster who was already out of her mother’s life by the time Malika had been born. Men often came and went: Carta grunts, with daggers at their belt and furtive expressions on their faces, who stayed a night or a week or a month and then melted away.  _Don’t mention the name Cadash_ , her mother would say.  _That name is for us_. She learned to keep secrets long before she learned why she kept them.

The brand on her face could render her invisible or indelible, depending on who was looking. If she kept to Dust Town, if she knew her place, it was easy to stay hidden. The guards fought each other to avoid that duty, and didn't look too closely at what duster children did so long as they stayed quiet; it was always easy enough to seek out the secret tunnels, the cracks in years-old rockfalls and the narrow gaps that older dwarves could never navigate whenever a message needed to be sent to the surface. Even when she slipped out into the Commons, the people there let their eyes slide right over her, twisted themselves in knots to avoid looking at her. But the moment something had been stolen, her brand was suddenly a beacon proclaiming guilt, warranted or not.

For the most part, life in Dust Town had been just as hard as it had ever been. The Hero of Ferelden was a duster, which you would have thought would count for something, but even with a statue outside the palace and a brand on the face of the queen, they were still mostly ignored and the choice was still a bust. Die in Dust Town in the service of the Carta or die in the Deep Roads in the service of the king; you’re fighting monsters in the dark either way. Or hunt yourself up a noble like Rica Brosca did, though ancestors forbid the child be a girl because then you would have two mouths to feed instead of one.

 _But those choices are for dusters_ , her mother would remind her sharply. Not for scions of House Cadash. Her choice was only loyalty, only duty.

That duty was to House Cadash specifically, and not to the Carta. The Carta, though given the definite article like something real and respectable, had always been more like a series of Cartas, like a pile of deepstalkers crawling over each other for scraps, or like the set of Nevarran stacking dolls she once stole from a market stall, painted figures one inside the other, each smaller than the last until the final one could fit within her child’s fist. Dust Town was the tiny doll with the smudged features; life on the surface, to hear her mother tell it, was the largest doll, richly painted and beautiful. It had been hard to imagine such a thing, even with the Cadash pin digging into her palm. Even in her memories of running messages the surface had featured as some kind of unreal fantasy, not a place where people lived: the sky a vast, too-bright thing above her; expanses of jewel-green grass under her feet; and above all, the endless space.

Back in Dust Town, Malika had had to learn to fight. All the black eyes and split lips she earned from fighting boys who made remarks about her mother, about snobs and pinched noses, she learned to give back tenfold. Her fists were enough until Jarvia put a knife in her hand right before Paragon Brosca cleaned house, and after that, the Carta gave her a hammer and taught her to swing it. You can learn a great many things as an enforcer, especially when you keep your loyalties hidden, pinned to your heart under your ragged leathers.

This was to be her lot, she had thought, until her mother pressed a map and a sovereign into her palm one day along with the latest message and whispered, “Find them, take your chance,” her breath hot on Malika’s ear. No one had argued when she told the merchants that she was to go with them to the Free Marches. They had their loyalties too, and, besides, she had her hammer. 'Caravan guard' was not much different from 'enforcer' anyway; it was only that you felt more like you might lose your grip on the road and float away into the sky. She had pressed the point of her pin into her skin to ground herself, and imagined the fresh air carving the gangue of Dust Town from her flesh.

Of course, the brand had still been indelible. Still a beacon.

She might have called herself Malika Cadash openly by then, but that didn’t mean that she belonged there. The others saw her as a duster first and foremost, a backwards Orzammar girl who by rights should have stayed there, hidden away in the dark. She took the grunt jobs, worked her way up, forced her way into the light until she proved herself too competent to be ignored. Smuggling lyrium came just as easily to her as smuggling information, and if she had to work a little harder than those with unblemished faces to get the same respect, well. Perhaps that was the price of getting out. It was strange, though, to learn to interact with their customers: mages and templars both, folk she had to crane her neck to look at, people who, for the first time, saw her as a dwarf foremost and a duster second.

The Conclave job had seemed like easy money. Spying has always been her bread and butter, after all; she's done it all her life.

It hadn't seemed so easy afterwards, when the Fade left her feeling even more disoriented than those first few trips above ground ever had. She feels sick just thinking about that endless void, the nothingness beyond the twisted, hideous shapes that flickered and writhed in her memory, just out of reach. Everything that followed is a blur, a parade of humans and demons and elves and one dwarf with a crossbow: something familiar in the midst of all that chaos.

She remembers seeing his eyes slide over her cheek, just for a moment. Just long enough to remind her that now she was doubly marked. _Duster_. _Herald_.

She knew him, of course, right away. Deshyr of the Merchant’s Guild, head of House Tethras, closest thing to Dwarven royalty that exists on the surface; you’d be hard pressed to find a single member of House Cadash who doesn’t know his name. But if he knew hers then, he didn’t let on, and he didn’t mention the brand. No one did; the rest of them were too polite to ask, or perhaps they didn’t notice. The humans were more concerned that a dwarf had become the symbol of their surface religion at all, never mind what kind of dwarf she was.

She remembers pressing her glowing hand to the stone of the Chantry walls and wondering if it was all this Andraste's idea of a joke.

They call her ‘Lady Cadash’ now; it sounds strange to her ears, but not as strange as the ceremonial sword feels in her grip, the weight of it all wrong compared with her maul. Afterwards, when the clamour in the courtyard has died down and she’s escaped to the familiar dankness of the inn, Varric hands her a mug and says, “You know, you dusters are two for two on world-saving. They should start a recruitment drive down there.” He grins at her, lopsided, his own scars writ across his face as bright as any brand. “Hey, you think Bhelen will make you a paragon for this?”

“I haven't saved anything yet," she reminds him, flexing her fingers around the mark that she's still not used to, around the unsettling thrum of magic beneath her skin. "And you know, if they put me next to Brosca, that'll be too much. They’ll have to admit that we’re people after all." She takes a sip of ale. "Anyway, I'm sure with that chest hair you’d make a much better looking statue,” she adds, and laughs when he chokes on his drink.

She leans back in her seat and lets the chatter of the tavern wash over her, imagining, just for a moment, the scent of damp and earth and stone, the bitter taste of mosswine. These days she wears the Cadash pin on her chest as openly as the brand on her face, but the mark on her hand eclipses them both.  _Once upon a time_ , she thinks,  _there was a band of outcasts who carved themselves a place._


End file.
